we find that the collective action requests and tattling to superiors requests generate higher levels of responsiveness from Chinese local governments than the simple denoscription of economic hardship; however, the identification as a Party loyalist, does not increase responsiveness substantially. With the baseline request, we received responses from approximately one third of counties. To put this number in context, one third is higher than responsiveness of U.S. state legislators to constituents (~20%) but lower than the responsiveness among members the U.S. congress (~40%) on certain issues. Adding the intention of collective action and tattling to superiors both increase response rates by 8-10 percentage points.

The second finding is that the collective action requests, compared with other types of requests, made the local government respond in a more public manner. This could be because local official are really concerned about social instability or because they believe responding publicly is a low-cost strategy to resolve similar problems among many citizens.

Third, we also find that local officials are more likely to provide pertinent and concrete information to citizens when receiving the collective action requests.

https://chinadatalab.ucsd.edu/viz-blog/sources-of-responsiveness/

However, the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or public spending are unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.

“Voters tend to prefer the original to the copy,” said Tarik Abou-Chadi, an associate professor of European politics at the University of Oxford and the co-founder of the Progressive Politics Research Network (PPRNet), which launched on Wednesday.

[...] Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left.

“Social democratic parties that have backed austerity fail to win the support of voters worried about public debt, and lose the backing of those who oppose austerity,” Bremer said. “Centre-left parties that actually impose austerity lose votes.”

[...] Fiscal orthodoxy – cutting taxes, capping spending, limiting public debt – worked for social democratic parties such as Tony Blair’s New Labour and Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany, but that was “a period of relative stability and growth”, he said.

“We’re now in a different era. The data strongly suggests centre-left parties can build a coalition of voters who believe a strong welfare state, effective public services and real investment, for example in the green transition, are essential,” Bremer said.

[...] Similarly, said Matthias Enggist of the University of Lausanne, analysis of data from eight European countries showed no evidence that welfare chauvinism – broadly, restricting immigrants’ access to welfare – was a successful strategy for the left.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/10/adopting-rightwing-policies-does-not-help-centre-left-win-votes

BRUSSELS — European Union negotiators reached an agreement Friday on the European Media Freedom Act, the bloc's new set of rules aimed at safeguarding the independence of newsrooms and fostering media pluralism.

The new law will introduce requirements for media to provide transparency over ownership and funding and it will force national governments to set up an oversight system that guarantees editorial freedom, including for public media. It also requires checks on mergers and sets up a new European watchdog to oversee it all.

[...] The media freedom proposal was presented by the Commission in September 2022 in a bid to counter media concentration and limits on editorial independence in parts of the EU. It has met a lot of resistance from national governments that feared the law would hurt their powers to oversee the media sector.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-negotiators-reach-agreement-on-media-law-to-curb-spying-on-reporters/

"Students will learn none of this from a 1619 Project that has botched the history of the slave economy, misconstrued the origins of Northern economic development, erased the history of antislavery, and rendered emancipation irrelevant. And, having failed in all these ways, the 1619 Project leaves its readers ignorant of one of the great problems in the history of the United States, indeed of the modern world. The problem can be stated succinctly: capitalism gave rise to both slavery and antislavery. Put differently, slavery became a problem within the history of capitalism. [...] The problem of slavery is not that it was a forerunner of modern capitalism. It wasn’t. The problem is not that slavery “fueled” the economic growth of the North. It didn’t. The problem, all along, was capitalism itself. And once the problem of slavery was resolved by the Civil War and emancipation, there remained, and still remains, the problem of capitalism."

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/1619-project-jake-silverstein-history-distorted-slavery-race/

With our co-authors, Dr. Patrick Holder and Dr. Haris Tabakovic, today we published a working paper that estimates the amount of money that Meta and Google should pay US news publishers for the value of the journalism and information they produce. Based on our analysis, we estimate that fair compensation by the platforms to US publishers would amount to as much as $13.9 billion a year.

https://www.techpolicy.press/google-and-meta-owe-us-publishers-14-billion-a-year/

The oft-used denoscription of early humans as “hunter-gatherers” should be changed to “gatherer-hunters,” at least in the Andes of South America, according to groundbreaking research led by a University of Wyoming archaeologist.

Archaeologists long thought that early human diets were meat-based. However, Assistant Professor Randy Haas’ analysis of the remains of 24 individuals from the Wilamaya Patjxa and Soro Mik'aya Patjxa burial sites in Peru shows that early human diets in the Andes Mountains were composed of 80 percent plant matter and 20 percent meat

[...] “Conventional wisdom holds that early human economies focused on hunting -- an idea that has led to a number of high-protein dietary fads, such as the Paleodiet,” Haas says. “Our analysis shows that the diets were composed of 80 percent plant matter and 20 percent meat.”

For these early humans of the Andes, spanning from 9,000 to 6,500 years ago, there is indeed evidence that hunting of large mammals provided some of their diets. But the new analysis of the isotopic composition of the human bones shows that plant foods made up the majority of individual diets, with meat playing a secondary role.

Additionally, burnt plant remains from the sites and distinct dental-wear patterns on the individuals’ upper incisors indicate that tubers -- or plants that grow underground, such as potatoes -- likely were the most prominent subsistence resource.

https://www.uwyo.edu/news/2024/01/uw-professors-research-challenges-hunter-gatherer-narrative.html

In June, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a motion to study the feasibility of implementing a type of public campaign financing called “democracy vouchers” that could boost engagement in local elections. The city’s chief legislative analyst and the Ethics Commission were tasked with issuing recommendations for a program that would give every Los Angeles resident a set of vouchers that could be donated to participating candidates for city office, who could then redeem them for campaign funding.

https://readsludge.com/2023/12/08/los-angeles-considers-democracy-vouchers-to-expand-engagement-in-city-elections/